"Year's End" by Richard Wilbur

I came upon this today, quite fortuitously, I suppose. Enjoy. Happy New Year to all. 2010 sounds much better than 2009, in my opinion.


"Year's End" by Richard Wilbur

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I've known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

Happy (or Distracted) New Year! from First Things' PoMo Con Blog

Here's an article that decries the modern celebration of New Years; Ivan has a peculiar style in his writing: he has excellent diction.  If you try to read it as a smug group of observations rather than coming from the gingivitis'd mouth of a vindictive street corner preacher, then you might enjoy it better (thus having distanced yourself properly from the accusations it tenders).

Here's the link to the article itself.

Here's a juicy except that might pique your interest.

Simon Winchester complains the typical New Year’s celebration has reduced to little more than an excuse for unrestrained drunkenness and revelry. He lays blame for this woeful development partly on the example of the Scottish who have long treated the occasion as an opportunity for drinking themselves into a state of “catatonic incapacity”. Also, some culpability lies with the creation and popularization of modern public clocks that have allowed us to meticulously track and therefore exaggerate and fetishize the grand drama of the exact moment. The combination of chronological exactitude and Scottish bacchanalia gives us the now generally expected annual ritual of “midnight debauchery”.

post script: To Dave Chuck: Thank God the Ball dropped on New Years.

Club Schmitz Review Website

I felt that we have been mysteriously silent on the subject of an oldie but a goodie, Club Schmitz.



If you are or were a student at University of Dallas and you haven't been to the "(pre-)historic" Club Schmitz, then you are missing out on a big UD tradition and committing a double bad naughty.  This place has been around since before the school and the only thing that is different is that they put in a TV and kickass Golf Arcade Game.  Here's a good website that puts it all in perspective for you.

Make sure that you go with friends, lots of friends; or maybe you just want a beer by yourself; either way, Club Schmitz is a great place to:

have a birthday party
film a movie about love, intrigue, drinking, and a vampire pimp and Socrates (John Sercer)
eat delicious fried bar food and drink pitchers of beer
meet babes
go to for a unintended but badly needed study break
take a girl on a first date
go to with Fr. McGuire

All of these are things that I have either done myself or Misko has done.

Get thee to Schmitz!

Sweetly,

Peter

p.s. - Click on the photo to enlarge it

Greece - Fall Romers 2009

Album Review: dave rawlings machine a friend of a friend

Acony Records is proud to announce the November 17 release of the Dave Rawlings Machine record,A Friend Of A Friend. The album features members of Old Crow Medicine Show, Benmont Tench from the Heartbreakers, Karl Himmel, Nate Walcott of Bright Eyes, and of course, Gillian Welch (from Gillian Welch's Website).

The new album produced by David Rawlings by the band dave rawlings machine titled "a friend of a friend" is sensational.  The majority of the tracks are written by David Rawlings and Gillian Welch and performed by those two as well as musical guests Ketch Secor, Willie Watson, the rest of the Old Crow Medicine Show gang, and many others.  

The album features songs such as 'To Be Young' (originally co-written by Ryan Adams and Dave Rawlings) and Old Crow's 'I Hear Them All.'

There is a great coming together of talent on this album, and I highly recommend it if you are a fan of Old Crow, Gillian Welch, Ryan Adams, Allison Kraus, Norah Jones, the Wallflowers, and Emmylou Harris, all of which Dave Rawlings has played with and inspired.

Dave Rawlings is the magic-folk-bluegrass-rock;n'roll-man behind the scenes in all these bands.  He found and inspired and backed many of these artists.

Listen to the song "Ruby" here.

Listen to "It's Too Easy" here.

Merry Christmas!


To: Friend 


From: Bloch Party


Greetings from a snow-filled Virginian suburb (reminds me of Gran Torino)!

I have been talking with my friend Mr. Crawford in Phoenix about how important the Christmas traditions are.  To have a Christmas tree, to sing carols, to put your shoes out for St. Nick: these constitute a fuller and richer Christmas.  Without these traditions Christmas can go one of two ways.  The first (a double bad naughty) way is to not have these traditions and devotions at all: this is a privation of taste and culture, but more importantly they are outward signs which show the proper joy at the incredible and momentous occasion as the celebration of the birth of God.  Therefore, a lack of these traditions is a scrooged mess.  It's all backwards, it's the proper vision of these outward signs that insures a proper understanding of Christmas.  The other way (only a venial, single bad naughty) way is to distort these traditions and Hallmarkize them: make Christmas distant by reducing it to a materialistic secular celebration of (albeit good honest virtues) gift-giving, fellowship, family, relaxation, Jesus, baby-Jesus, and peace on earth Obama Prius Recycling Juno Soundtrack Latte Indie Macbook Dreadlock Christmas.


Last night I went to traditional Latin Midnight mass at St. John's in McLean Virginia. The profundity of the nativity was impressed upon me amidst the beauty of the full choir and orchestra singing magnificent polyphony and chant, amidst the incense billowing out and the old priest struggling to genuflect at the consecration, the incarnation--God becoming man and being among us and one of us.  
The hallmarkization of Christmas allows us to hide and cover up the fact that Jesus was God made flesh and born in a manger (a food trough--oh okay, let's put the king of the universe in a dog food bowl).  
Without the full effect of these traditions, another Christmas goes by, we loose the magic of Santa coming and there is nothing but either an absence of understanding or a covering up of the meaning of Christmas.  These traditions--having a Christmas tree, giving gifts, caroling, visiting the cresh, lighting the advent wreath--need to be reinvigorated, refreshed.  St. Francis did this when he created the world's first ever dramatic representation of the cresh or nativity scene.  He did it that the people might know that it was a hardship, a birth in a stable, laying in a food bin on the refuse of oriental hay, but it brought the fact of the incarnation to the people.


So how can we restore the traditions that are so important?  My friend, Mr. Crawford, and I believe that it is imperative that you have a Christmas tree at the very least.

• Buy a real tree, get a tree if you have a family (bachelors need to get trees too).
• Get an advent wreath and light the candles at dinner (bachelors need to eat dinner sitting down).
• Don't listen to "Christmas Music" until at least a week before Christmas, so that you can still have the energy to celebrate the traditional 12 days of Christmas.
• Take a chance on Christmas Eve to meditate on this one thought: God (the first mover, infinite Being, and your creator) became like that which he created.  He became man, took on our nature!  The incarnation is something that has rocked the world for 2000 years and caused history to turn.  Just ponder the significance of that for about, I don't know, 10-15 minutes.
• Sing traditional Christmas carols when you are with friends.
• Go to a concert, many churches patronize the arts in the Christmas season, and often put on performances from Handle's Messiah and other classically beautiful pieces.
• Eat, Drink, and be merry!  Leisure is the basis of culture, and the feast is possible through leisure.
• Visit the nativity scene at Church and pray in front of it, realizing that it was a hardship, not a hallmark warm-fuzzy to be born in a stable.

I love you all.  I want to be with you, but I am snowed in.  I do wish you the most festivity possible on this Christmas 2009.  With affection for you and general scorn for the behavior of Kanye West toward TSwift,

            Peter Bloch

Mr. Frost

There's supposed to be a blizzard here all weekend. I thought this was apropos even though all of you have read it.
Also, this poem reminds me of Pascal talking about the then new cosmology, who points out how humbling and incomprehensible the size of the universe is.

Desert Places by: Robert Frost

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast In a field I looked into going past, And the ground almost covered smooth in snow, But a few weeds and stubble showing last. The woods around it have it--it is theirs. All animals are smothered in their lairs. I am too absent-spirited to count; The loneliness includes me unawares. And lonely as it is that loneliness Will be more lonely ere it will be less-- A blanker whiteness of benighted snow With no expression, nothing to express. They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars--on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places.

Surprise

Possibly the funniest thing I've seen on SNL since Chris Farley.

If you like Brandi Carlile, Patsy Cline, etc.

Check out Joe Firstman

His song "The One that Makes You Happy" is like an alt country version of John Mayer.

His other music consists of a more energetic and alternative rock n roll style; overall, Joe Firstman is quite enjoyable.

josh neu's Abercrombie face

Google Trends

Google trends tracks the number of times a certain word or phrase has been searched on Google and compiles the data on a graph.  Here is what the google-machine came up with for the word Jerry.

Not incredibly interesting but if you search terms like "end of the world" you find interesting results: there are suspicious spikes in the number of times that the phrase is searched in 2008 and 2009.

Uselessly,

PB

These lines

from today's poemAday really struck me as masterful.

Look for smaller signs instead, the fine
disturbances of ordered things when suddenly
the rhythms of your expectation break
and in a moment's pause another world
reveals itself behind the ordinary.

-by poet Dana Gioia

Liberal Arts in Claremont, CA

Hey dudes,
Just wanted to show off this article I've written for the Claremont Independent, the Conservative student magazine on campus here. I showed up to one of their editorial meetings and they asked if I'd write an article on literature and the liberal arts; I said, "heck yes." It was interesting writing it because Claremont McKenna is a secular liberal arts college. I saw this as an opportunity to introduce these guys to some Catholic voices on the liberal arts. Hope you like it,
CWolfe

Some Authorities on Literature and the Liberal Arts

Earlier this semester, I had the pleasure of attending a debate at the Athenaeum titled “Is CMC a True Liberal Arts College?” This was an interesting topic for debate, because the wording of the title implies two questions. First, “what exactly is a ‘true’ liberal arts college?” Second “should CMC be a true liberal arts college?” The debaters primarily discussed the second question, with conversation focusing on practical issues, mainly on the possibility of getting a job after college. From my vantage point, I did not the debaters adequately answered the first question before they moved on to rejecting or accepting it as the purpose of CMC. This is completely understandable; the liberal arts is a difficult subject to give its full due. I myself cannot give a full account of the liberal arts, but I do know of some authorities within the tradition and within the Claremont community that are up to the challenge of answering some of the more pressing questions surrounding the liberal arts.

Q. 1: Cliff’s Notes, anyone? Well, Cliff’s Notes do work well as shortcuts. The benefit of shortcuts is that they make exchanges quick, efficient, and cost-effective. Unfortunately, the opposite characterizes the leisured discussion of the free people. Leisure, as philosopher Josef Peiper says, is “the basis of culture;” in order to be open to what the liberal arts offer, we must be in a passive state of mind. I refer the reader to a 1990 CSPAN interview with Mortimer J. Adler, co-founder of the Great Books Program. A caller from Canada phoned in and asked Adler what he thought of his idea for a speed-reading program of the classics. With a visceral reaction Adler replied:

"No! You can’t speed read them. I think you have to read them word by word. You have to ponder the sentences. When I’m reading a great book I never read faster than 20 pages an hour, sometimes slower, because it’s hard, hard work… I never read more than an hour or an hour and a half, because I get tired."

When asked if he had to choose between speed-reading the classics or not reading the classics, Adler said definitively, “No reading.”

Q. 2: What do liberal arts do for the human person? As a virtuous activity, studying the liberal arts has its benefits as well as its hard work. To those who support CMC’s focus on the liberal arts, the rewards are too important to be overlooked. Professor John Farrell spoke eloquently on the subject: “The liberal arts teach you how to approach the most important question concerning human beings, how to live. Before you can pursue that question, you need to have some sense of what the world is, what human beings are, and how they relate to each other.” Literature lays the foundation for answering this all-important question through the most natural of activities, which we have all engaged in since childhood- listening to stories. We need to listen to stories in order to understand man and his place before asking “what is the best way of life?” As Professor Farrell puts it, “the study of literature (including poetry) is the study of stories and story-making. All of our lives are guided by the stories we inhabit—stories about the world past and present, what it is and how it got here. We invest in stories about our nations, our institutions, the genesis and pursuit of our ideals, our own families, and our personal course of life.” Put in these terms, the liberal arts come to look less “useless” and in fact necessary for living.

Q. 3: What is the relationship of literature to the other sciences? The question of organization of the disciplines is a critical one. If Claremont McKenna is to be a true” liberal arts college, it must know which discipline is its queen. Without a hierarchy, there is no best way of life proposed, and academia reverts to its default relativistic mode. I would like to close this discussion on literature and the liberal arts with a reflection from John Henry Newman:

“The book of nature is called Science, the book of man is called Literature. Literature and Science, thus considered, nearly constitute the subject matter of Liberal Education… Science is grave, methodical, logical; with Science then she (theology) argues, and opposes reason to reason. Literature does not argue, but declaims and insinuates; it is multiform and versatile: it persuades instead of convincing, it seduces, it carries captive; it appeals to the sense of honour, or to the imagination, or to the stimulus of curiosity; it makes its way by means of gaiety, satire, romance, the beautiful, the pleasurable.” (from The Idea of the University)